Workshop Programme for 2018 West Cork Literary Festival
05-Jan-2018
Monday 16 - Friday 20 July 2018
9.30am - 12.30pm
Coláiste Pobail BheanntraÃ, Seskin, Bantry
Poetry for Beginners: Pushing It with Billy Ramsell
You've started to write poetry. You've been
assembling coherent lines and stanzas, wrenching music from sentences and
syllables. You might even have been lucky enough
to see your work in print.
This workshop is designed to help you take the next step.
We'll learn not to rest contented with a poem's earliest configuration.
Instead we'll keep pushing things, playing with shape and meaning in the hope
that a text's full potential might be unlocked.
We'll use as our exemplars not only contemporary poets like Alice Oswald
and Jorie Graham but also canonical figures like Wordsworth and Donne, as well
writers and artists like Schoenberg, Kafka and Picasso.
We'll utilise a variety of techniques, from rhyming to dreaming, to let our
poems reveal their intentions.
We'll work together in order to push ourselves, and our compositions,
somewhere genuinely unexpected.
Billy Ramsell was born in Cork in 1977 and educated at the
North Monastery and UCC. He has published two collections with Dedalus Press,
Complicated Pleasures in 2007 and The Architect's Dream of Winter in 2013, which
was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and has recently been
published in Italian translation.
He was awarded the Chair of Ireland Bursary for 2013 and the Poetry Ireland
Residency Bursary for 2015. He has been invited to read his work at many
festivals and literary events around the world and has taught on the MFA
programme at Sierra Nevada College. He lives in Cork where he co-runs an
educational publishing company.
In Creative Writing for Beginners, we'll
explore the various elements of writing, from ideas and first lines, to
characterisation, setting and dialogue. Whether you're interested in poetry,
fiction or memoir, the emphasis will be on finding the right form for you and
trusting your own voice. The class will include exercises and examples from
literature, and will conclude with advice on revising and submitting your
work.
Eimear Ryan's writing has appeared in Winter Papers, Granta, The Stinging
Fly, The Dublin Review, Town & Country (Faber) and The Long Gaze Back (New
Island). She has won several awards for her short stories, including a Hennessy
First Fiction Award and the Sean Dunne Young Writer Award. She is co-editor of
the literary journal Banshee.
In this workshop, appropriate for writers of
all levels (from those with intentions to write a novel to those with a novel
draft in hand), we will explore practices and methods for developing maps and
timelines and plans for writing a novel, best approaches to understanding the
sources and inspirations for situations and stories (in general and in
particular), and how to consider best narrative strategies for the situation and
story of each novel in the workshop. Issues of structure, pacing, tone, style,
language, and above all, voice will be our constant concerns. Where does the
narrative begin? Where does it end? Who is telling this story, and why? What is
the meaning? What is the sensibility?
In the course of the week we will read and discuss short excerpts from a
variety of texts (provided in handouts) for inspiration, as well as the work of
students in the class. There will be brief exercises in class each day, as well
as optional homework for the ambitious. Ideally, students will leave this
workshop with insights about their own writing styles and voices and
inspirations, with strategies for moving forward with new writing as well as
ideas about effective revising.
Students should bring to the first workshop meeting copies (five thousand
words maximum) from any part of the novel in progress, along with a narrative
description of the project, especially if it hasn't yet materialised on the
page. Each student will have the opportunity to schedule a private 30 minute
conference with the workshop tutor in the course of the
week.
Katharine Weber is the author of six
novels. She has held the Richard L. Thomas Chair in Creative Writing at Kenyon
College for the past six years, and previously taught creative writing at Yale
University (for eight years), Goucher College, Connecticut College, and over
four summers in the Paris Writers Workshop. For six years she served as a
fiction thesis advisor and evaluator for the MFA program at Columbia
University's School of the Arts.
In 1996, Katharine was named one of Granta Magazine's "50 Best Young
American Novelists." Her novels have been named New York Times Notable Books
three times, have twice been longlisted for the Impac Dublin Literary Award,
twice shortlisted for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award, twice shortlisted for
the Paterson Fiction Prize, and twice shortlisted for the Connecticut Book
Award, which she won in 2007. Her novels have been translated and published in
16 languages. In addition to numerous stories and essays published in
anthologies, her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Story, Boulevard
Magenta, Connecticut Review, Gargoyle, Five Chapters, and Southwest Review,
among other publications. Her short story "Sleeping," widely anthologized, has
been adapted into a prize-winning short film. Her book reviews, essays, and
journalism have appeared in publications including The New York Times Book
Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Chicago Tribune, The New Yorker,
The Boston Globe, The London Review of Books, The Washington Post, Salon.com,
The New York Times, New Leader, American Imago, and Architectural
Digest.
Katharine is an Editor at Large for the Kenyon Review, and
is on the Editorial Advisory Board of the psychoanalytic journal American Imago.
She has served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, is a member of
PEN and The Authors Guild, and is an associate fellow of Hopper College at Yale
University.
Join award-winning Sunday Times' journalist
Justine McCarthy for a five-day journalism workshop. Justine will look
at:
1. The Death Wish Career: Why it makes perfect sense to follow a career
that will consume your life and possibly kill you early in a business that is
dying on its feet.
2. Investigative Journalism is Tautological Self-Aggrandisement: Why all
journalism should be investigative, and how to do it.
3. Pack Your Stamina and a Stomach for Subversion: Because objectivity is a
myth, these are your rudimentary tools.
4. Where Have All the People Gone? How journalism styles have changed.
Welcome to the age of predictive journalism when today's newspaper will tell you
what politicians will tell you tomorrow.
5. The System, the Spin, the Solicitors, the Sheer Stress - the biggest
impediments to telling the truth, and how fake news is a gift to our dumb
world.
In advance of the workshop participants will be asked to submit a 500 word
piece to Justine starting: "I want to be a journalist because..."
Bandonian Justine McCarthy is a columnist and political
correspondent with The Sunday Times.She is the author of two books, Mary
McAleese: The Outsider and Deep Deception: Scandals in Irish Swimming. She is a
frequent broadcaster and public speaker and was an adjunct professor of
journalism at the University of Limerick.She has written for the Guardian, the
Washington Post and the Observer and has won more than a dozen journalism
awards, including columnist of the year, features writer of the year, woman
journalist of the year, public interest story of the year, campaigning and
social justice journalist of the year, and the Journalists' Journalist award for
features writing.
She was named after a Bantry man, Justin McCarthy, who was her father's
dear friend.
Words Allowed: Workshop for
Teenage Writers with Dave Lordan
Back by popular demand, Dave
Lordan's legendary Words Allowed workshop for
teenage writers returns to the festival in 2018 for
the eighth year in a row. Designed to build the
creative confidence and expressive ability of teenagers with an interest in
writing it combines a high-energy workshop approach with talks and Q&A
sessions on being a writer in the contemporary world where multimedia
technologies and performance writing are assuming more importance alongside
traditional book publishing.
In an atmosphere of group support and encouragement for individual
creativity, each participant will be facilitated in
pursuing their own writing interests and in
generating new work. This is Ireland's leading
workshop for teenage writers and demand is always high so please book early to
avoid disappointment.
Dave Lordan is a multi-genre writer, performer,
editor, and pathbreaking multimedia educator with
four acclaimed books &
twenty years experience in creativity education &
cultural programme design. Check out his
colourful new website at davelordan.com or follow Dave
Lordan on YouTube or
Facebook.
As well as West Cork Literary Festival, Dave
has provided workshops for RTE, the Irish Film
Institute, Dublin City Libraries, Ledbury Poetry
Festival, Courthouse Arts Centre, The Irish Countrywomen's Association,
Youthreach, Youthspeaks,
Children's Books Ireland and numerous other schools, institutions and festivals.
He teaches creative writing at the Irish Writers Centre and the Big Smoke
Writing Factory and he lectures on the MA in Poetry Studies at the Mater Dei
Institute and at The American College Dublin.
